“Brewster Kahle wants to create a free, online collection of human knowledge. It sounds impossibly idealistic—but he is making progress.”
More on Kahle’s mission here.
via @Harvard_Press
The Evolution of Religions: A Talk by Jared Diamond
A good find by Kottke.org…
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), offers a lecture at USC where he gets into the universal attributes of religions and their underlying adaptive value/social purpose. The talk runs about 41 minutes, followed by a long Q&A session.
For those looking for more academic lectures, I should remind you of the recent launch of YouTube EDU and Academic Earth, plus our large collection of free university courses.
via @kottkedotorg
YouTube Launches Library of Congress Channel (and Thomas Edison’s Boxing Cat)
The Library of Congress has just set up shop on YouTube. On this new channel, you’ll find some new and vintage footage. Above, we’re directing your attention to a clip called “Boxing Cats.” It’s from 1894 and was produced by Thomas Edison’s Black Maria film studio in West Orange, New Jersey. In no way do I condone cat cockfights, but this is some intriguing historical footage. And who knew that there was a little bit of Steve Martin in Thomas Edison? I’ve added the Library of Congress Channel to our page, Intelligent YouTube: The Best Smart Video Collections.
The Talking Heads at CBGB’s (and a Virtual Tour of the Joint)
CBGB’s was a longtime mecca of the New York music scene, a venue that helped launch the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and the Talking Heads onto the national stage. And then it closed in 2006. If you never visited the club on Bowery and Bleecker Streets, you can still take a pretty vivid virtual tour. It starts in the bathroom and you then can wind your way through the rest of the joint. Above, we’ve posted some vintage footage of the Talking Heads performing “Psycho Killer” at CBGB’s, somewhere back in the mid-70s.
More New Dylan
Last week, Bob Dylan released for a limited time a free mp3 (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin”) from his upcoming album, Together Through Life. Over at Newsweek, you’ll now find another cut being streamed — “Feel A Change Comin’ On.” Head on over and have a listen.
via Stereogum
Women in Film
Eggman913 on YouTube has a pretty neat schtick. He takes artistic images, then morphs them together in pretty creative ways. The piece above plays with images of famous actresses from different moments in American film history. Eggman913 has also created a montage called Women in Art, which we’ve featured here before. (It has only 9.2 million views on YouTube.) Then there are pieces that have fun with the art of Picasso and Monet, plus a companion clip called Men in Film. The actresses shown in the video above include:
Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer, Ruth Chatterton, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Deborah Kerr, Judy Garland, Anne Baxter, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Janet Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Ann Margret, Julie Andrews, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, Holly Hunter, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Diane Lane, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry.
Stanford Teaches You to Develop iPhone Apps (Free)
A quick heads up: Stanford has just launched a free software development course for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The lectures will be rolled out on iTunes first, and eventually they will be posted on YouTube as well. You can get the first lecture on iTunes here. This 10 week computer science course is officially called iPhone Application Programming. Watch for new lectures to be posted weekly. You’ll be learning to develop iPhone apps in no time.
You can find this course housed under the Computer Science section of our collection of Free University Courses.
The Original Spider-Man TV Series Now Online
A light (and, for me, nostalgic) way to ease into the weekend…
Over at Marvel.com, they’re streaming episodes from the original Spider-Man TV series that hit the airwaves back in 1967. A new episode will be posted every Thursday. Above, you’ll find Episode 1, and see where it all began.
The Rothko Panoramic Tour: A New Way to See Art
This really caught my eye…
If you didn’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern (and chances are you didn’t), then you can still see it virtually. As you’ll see, the Tate Modern has created a fantastic web site that lets you take a panoramic tour of the Rothko collection. Once you enter the tour here, you should switch into full screen mode (look toward the bottom of screen), then use the arrows and your mouse to move around. You can move from room to room, and zoom in on various paintings. Quite the way to see an exhibition if you can’t make a long journey.
What Did Shakespeare Really Look Like?
“Over the centuries a number of images have been put forward as life portraits of our greatest writer, but at present none of them is generally accepted as such. Up until now… With the emergence of the Cobbe portrait, we are presented with a contemporary portrait that has strong claims to represent the dramatist as he appeared to his contemporaries.”
These lines from shakespearefound.org.uk (associated with the University of Warwick) set the stage for a 20 minute video/film that features Prof. Stanley Wells talking about the Cobbe portrait, and why it’s believed to present the real Shakespeare, the towering author we still know little about today. You can watch the video above, or find it on iTunesU, where it’s among the most downloaded videos.
Related Content:
Goethe and Shakespeare on Google
Shakespeare and the Uses of Political Power
Classic Oscar Moments
On the Oscar Channel on YouTube, you can flip through some classic prize-winning moments. Above, we feature Roberto Benigni’s speech upon receiving The Academy Award for best actor (Life is Beautiful) in 1998. You can also see vintage speeches by Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Federico Fellini, and others. Perhaps a questionable call, The Oscar Channel has been added to our page, Intelligent YouTube: The Best Smart Video Collections.
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